Posts Tagged ‘Election 2008’

Colin Woodard, a journalist and historian, claims that the United States of America is not a unified nation, but an arena of struggle among separate and distinct regional cultures.

For more than 250 years, he wrote, American history has been shaped by the basic conflict between regions he calls Yankeedom and Deep South, and the shifting alliances among the other regions.

Canada, too, is shaped by regional identity. In fact, neither the United States nor Canada is a unified nation at all, according to Woodard; the real nations of North America are the 11 regional cultures, which are as follows:

Yankeedom, heirs of the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay.

New Netherland, heirs of the tolerant, commercial Dutch culture of New Amsterdam.

Midlands, heirs of the tolerant culture established by Quakers in the Delaware Bay.

Tidewater, heirs of the aristocratic culture established by Cavaliers around the Chesapeake Bay.

Greater Appalachia, heirs of the original settlers of the Appalachian back country

The Deep South, heirs of English West Indian slave owners who settled in South Carolina

The Left Coast, heirs of New England Yankees who settled the Pacific Northwest.

The Far West, heirs of the varied pioneers who settled this harsh region.

El Norte, heirs of the original Spanish settlers of northern Mexico and the American Southwest.

New France, heirs of the original French-Canadian settlers and their Cajun cousins.

First Nation, heirs of indigenous peoples of the Far North.

I recently finished reading his book, American Nations: the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011), on the recommendation of my friend, Janus Mary Jones.

I think the regional rivalries he described are real. I learned things I hadn’t known. But I think he errs in trying to interpret American history exclusively in terms of regional conflict.

When Barack Obama was nominated for President in 2008, he offered Hillary Clinton, as the price of her support, a Cabinet post and the promise to back her candidacy in 2016.

Bernie Sanders asked much less in return for his support of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy—merely a non-binding Democratic platform that supported his progressive agenda. He didn’t even get all of that. The Democrats have come around to a $15 an hour minimum wage, but refuse to take a stand on fracking or the odious Trans Pacific Partnership agreement.

The difference between 2008 and 2016 is that Obama and Clinton were both candidates of the status quo (which I didn’t realize then) whereas the Sanders candidacy was a real threat to the moneyed interests that who support Clinton.

It is not that Sanders supported anything radical. Although he called himself a socialist, he ran as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat. He supported restoration of New Deal programs that worked well in the past and a few programs, such as Medicare for all, that have worked well in foreign countries, while having little to say about foreign policy.

But to enact these modest reforms would require a real political revolution because they are unacceptable to the kind of bankers and billionaires who made Bill and Hillary Clinton rich.